What a (virtual) World!

I just made my first virtual appearance at a conference, and was so grateful to have been able to listen in on the session I organized for this year's Kalamazoo. Having just given birth a few weeks ago, there was no way to make my annual pilgrimage this year, so I decided to take a note from Petrarch and attend virtually!

I posted the description of the session a while back, and it was such a delight to see how well all of the speakers' papers intersected with one another. Due to connection issues, I missed a portion of the session but -- thanks to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and the wonders of live-tweeting -- was able to get brought back into the room! The connection issues made my ability to comment somewhat limited during the QA, but I greatly enjoyed getting to listen to all of the questions and comments that cropped up during the discussion. I was struck in particular by a question about how we might define "world" and "earth" against/alongside one another in light of the papers presented today, and I think that this session raised some compelling ideas about such definitions. The papers tended to emphasize how world-building is born out of various kinds of desires/impulses and, with that in mind, perhaps we could say that in contrast with "earth" (which could suggest concreteness, reality, etc.), "worlds" and "world-building" encompass a vast -- even infinite -- array of imaginary realms born out of desired alternatives. As Asa said at the beginning of his talk, for instance, Christendom itself is a deeply imagined, and deeply desired, world, but it is hardly real. And so, perhaps one of the main questions both raised and addressed by the session is how and why worlds are created in medieval literature. Moreover, what kinds of new understandings can we reach about medieval literature by considering the engendered worlds that appear within them, most of which are so very different from the earthly cultures that produce the texts in question?

This is a discussion I hope to see continue in the near future (more on that later!).

But for now, I'll simply express my gratitude for having been able to transport myself (however briefly) to Kalamazoo in order to see this session (engendered over pints at Bell's Brewery last year) come to fruition.

Thanks to Edith Burney Donnell for the photo! 

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: Kalamazoo 2014

As I get ready to depart for the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I thought I would post about the many things that I and my co-blogger Kate are up to. Unfortunately, Kate isn't able to make it this year, but she still has put in lots of work organizing things, and I am presenting and performing and presiding as well. So, here are the panels featuring Kate and me:

1. Friday at  7:30 p.m. (Valley III, Stinson Lounge) will be the always-fun Malory Aloud readers' theater. The theme this year is "Malory Interruptus: Sex and Love in the Mort." 

Kate has chosen and casted some really fun scenes from Malory, and, since she can't be at the conference, my colleague Kara McShane and I are taking the helm. It should be a lot of fun!

Malory Interruptus: Sex and Love in the Mort.
Organizer: Leila K. Norako, Notre Dame de Namur Univ.
Presider: Leila K. Norako 
A readers’ theater performance with Stephen Atkinson, Park Univ.; Alison Baker, California State Polytechnic Univ.–Pomona; Laura K. Bedwell, Univ. of Mary Hardin-Baylor; Kristi J. Castleberry, Univ. of Rochester; Kimberly Jack, Auburn Univ.; Timothy R. Jordan, Zane State College; Kara L. McShane, Univ. of Rochester; John Lowell Leland, Salem International Univ.; Bernard Lewis, Murray State Univ.; Meredith Reynolds, Francis Marion Univ.; Rebecca Proud, Clermont College, Univ. of Cincinnati; Sebastian Rider-Bezerra, Aberystwith Univ.; Kendra Smith, Univ. of California–Davis; Padmini Sukumaran, St. John’s Univ., New York; and Paul R. Thomas, Brigham Young Univ./Chaucer Studio.

2. Saturday at 1:30 (Session 429 in Bernhard 204), Kara and I are also presiding over a panel on "Animals in Arthuriana." We're exciting about the range of interesting papers we've collected.

Animals in Arthuriana
Sponsor: Rossell Hope Robbins Library, Univ. of Rochester
Organizer: Kristi J. Castleberry, Univ. of Rochester, and Kara L. McShane, Univ. of Rochester
Presider: Kristi J. Castleberry and Kara L. McShane

The Monstrosity of Sin and the Prose Merlin’s Demon Cat
        Sharon Rhodes, Univ. of Rochester
Tristan and Medieval Hunting Manuals
        Emily R. Huber, Franklin & Marshall College
Shoulders Like an Ox, or, Smiling Like a Tiger? Arthurian Animal Identities in Terry Pratchett’s Albion
        Kristin Noone, Univ. of California–Riverside

3. And, lastly, on Saturday at 3:30 (Session 446 in Fetzer 1005) I will be presenting on BABEL's roundtable, "What a World!" Kate pulled together the papers for this one on the theme of worldbuilding, and she will be skyping in. I am sure it will lead to some great discussion.

What a World! (A Roundtable)
Sponsor: BABEL Working Group
Organizer: Eileen A. Joy, BABEL Working Group
Presider: Leila K. Norako, Notre Dame de Namur Univ.

An English Hero, a Barbarian Kingdom: The Colonialist Impulse in Chivalric and Ruritanian Romances
        Andrea Lankin, St. Joseph’s Univ.
The Once and Future Herod: Vernacular Typology and the Worlds of English Cycle Drama
        Chris Taylor, Univ. of Texas–Austin
England Is the World and the World Is England
        Asa Simon Mittman, California State Univ.–Chico
England by Any Other Name: Nominal Topographies in The Tale of Albin
        Kristi J. Castleberry, Univ. of Rochester
A World without War: Chaucer and the Politics of Unconditional Friendship
        Paul Megna, Univ. of California–Santa Barbara
Imagining Medieval Futures
        Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Univ. of Toronto
Engineering Beowulf: Multi-media and Multi-modal Medievalism
        Valerie B. Johnson, Georgia Institute of Technology

What a World!: Or, an invitation to BABEL along with me at K'zoo 2014

Good news! My proposed session, sponsored by the BABEL working group, has been given the green light for Congress next year. It springs in equal parts out of work on my book and from a lively conversation at Bell's brewery at this year's gathering in sunny Kalamazoo. The fine details: it will be a roundtable, hopefully comprised of seven participants. We're encouraging papers that veer towards the experimental, the playful, even the avant-garde, but given the wideness of the topic, there's plenty of room in which to maneuver and plenty of space for a variety of approaches; multimedia presentations are greatly encouraged.

Title: What a World! (A Roundtable)

Description:

“Oh what a world, what a world! Who would have thought a good little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?!” So screams the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy splashes water on her in the film The Wizard of Oz. The entire film reflects upon matters of perspective and thwarted/exceeded expectations, of not quite believing your eyes or trusting what you see, of creating contexts for experiences you never could have anticipated. The witch melts, in the end, because of her failure to imagine a world in which both she Dorothy could exist. While the gist of this line accords with the final words the Witch speaks in the book version, the phrase “What a World!” (original to the film) encourages meta-commentary. We are called, as viewers and as readers, to wonder along with the witch how this world — and such a vivid one at that — could have been engendered. In this sense, the phrase “What a World!” becomes as much an invitation to engage critically as it becomes a statement of wonder.

The issues inherent in fictionalized worlds, so beautifully encapsulated in this scene from The Wizard of Oz film, have much to offer studies of medieval literature. This session invites papers that consider all aspects of engendered worlds, but is especially invested in exploring how contemporary notions of “worldbuilding” — so often associated with high fantasy and science fiction— as well as Heiddeger’s “worlding” (in all its various theoretical manifestations and adaptations) can be appropriated to discuss the creation of fictive worlds in medieval literature. The session seeks to explore worlds built through varying states of incredulity, wonder, a desire to control and contextualize, or even built out of nostalgia and/or a desire to escape (however briefly) one’s own circumstances — from the translocated Holy Land of the mystery cycle plays, to the worlds encountered through chronicles, histories, and travel narratives, to the landscapes and cultures of Arthurian romance. How might the concept of “worldbuilding” invite fresh considerations and interrogations of medieval literature? How does it simultaneously reflect the desires authors have to create something new even as they (or their texts) admit the impossibilities of such projects? To what extent do engendered worlds allow and invite contemplation upon the many ways in which humans, as readers and receivers of texts, ineffably participate in this process of creation?